The claim that the core of religion lay in the inner life of an indivdual and in the impassioned outopurings of his innermost thoughts before God is quite unique in the history of Judaism. Intensity of prayer, to be sure, has always been known, and the tradition of adding spontaneous devotions to the liturgy goes back to Talmudic rabbis, some of whom even used their native Arameic. The term hisbodedut, first popularized through the influence of the Bahya's Duties of the Heart in the eleventh century, has a long history in Jewish philosophy and mysticism. In both Lurianic Kabbalah and the Beshtiab Hasidism, prayer is at the very center of the religious life. And yet, despite all this precedent, the tone in Bratslav is quite new; without rebellion against either law or liturgy, there is something new and daring about it, something almost "Protestant" and almost modern. For Judaism, not having had an Augustinian tradtion, the notion that the struggle to be near God, and the need to break one's heart in order to do so, are the very essence of reigion, is not readily to be taken for granted. Religion as an inner aloneness with God and the purely personal pouring out of the heart before Him does not easily sit with the deeply communitarian and activist elements of the Jewish tradition. In a religious world where the study of the Torah and action through the mitsvot are the essential categories of life with God, all this emphasis on personal prayer and individual needs, might at best seem irrelevant, at worst solipsistic and perverse. The religious path of Bratslav combine an absolute and uncompromising devotion to Jewish Orthodoxy with a knowledge - often unspoken, particularly to other pious Jews - that this life of inner openness and spontenous discourse with God is on some level all that really matters
(Arthur Green, The Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nachamn of Bratslav, Jewish Lights Publishing, p. 146)
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